DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING V/s GRID COMPUTING

Management of Software Projects

SUBMITTED BY: MRIDUL SHARMA FAALOK AWASTHI FRAJEEV CHATURVEDI FAVINASH MISHRA F- 44

ABSTRACT
There are two similar trends moving in tandem- distributed computing and grid computing. Depending on how you look at the market, the two either overlap, or distributed computing is a subset of grid computing. Grid Computing got its name because it strives for an ideal scenario in which the CPU cycles and storage of millions of systems across a worldwide network function as a flexible, readily accessible pool that could be harnessed by anyone who needs it. Sun defines a computational grid as "a hardware and software infrastructure that provides dependable, consistent, pervasive, and inexpensive access to computational capabilities." Grid computing can encompass desktop PCs, but more often than not its focus is on more powerful workstations, servers, and even mainframes and supercomputers working on problems involving huge datasets that can run for days. And grid computing leans more to dedicated systems, than systems primarily used for other tasks. Large-scale distributed computing of the variety we are covering usually refers to a similar concept, but is more geared to pooling the resources of hundreds or thousands of networked end-user PCs, which individually are more limited in their memory and processing power, and whose primary purpose is not distributed computing, but rather serving their user. When going for a new technology its a must for us to asses competing technologies and compare it with the new trends. In this paper we discuss How Distributed Computing differs from Grid Computing, the Application Characteristics that make distributed computing different from grid computing. We also discuss the areas where these computational technologies can be applied. Security and the standards behind these technologies have also been discussed.

DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING
Introduction
The numbers of real applications are still somewhat limited, and the challenges, particularly standardization, are still significant. But there's a new energy in the market, as well as some actual paying customers. Increasing desktop CPU power and communications bandwidth has also helped to make distributed computing a more practical idea. Various vendors have developed numerous initiatives and architectures to permit distributed processing of data and objects across a network of connected systems. The area of distributed computing has received a lot of attention, and it will be a primary focus of this paper--an environment where you can harness idle CPU cycles and storage space of hundreds or thousands of networked systems to work together on a processingintensive problem. The growth of such processing models has been limited, however, due to a lack of compelling applications and by bandwidth bottlenecks, combined with significant security, management, and standardization challenges.

How It Works
A distributed computing architecture consists of very lightweight software agents installed on a number of client systems, and one or more dedicated distributed computing management servers. There may also be requesting clients with software that allows them to submit jobs along with lists of their required resources. An agent running on a processing client detects when the system is idle, notifies the management server that the system is available for processing, and usually requests an application package. The client then receives an application package from the server and runs the software when it has spare CPU cycles, and sends the results back to the server. If the user of the client system needs to run his own applications at any time, control is immediately returned, and processing of the distributed application package ends.

A Typical Distributed System

Distributed Computing Management Server The servers have several roles. They take distributed computing requests and divide their large processing tasks into smaller tasks that can run on individual desktop systems (though sometimes this is done by a requesting system). They send application packages and some client management software to the idle client machines that request them. They monitor the status of the jobs being run by the clients. After the client machines run those packages, they assemble the results sent back by the client and structure them for presentation, usually with the help of a database. The server is also likely to manage any security, policy, or other management functions as necessary, including handling dialup users whose connections and IP addresses are inconsistent. Obviously the complexity of a distributed computing architecture increases with the size and type of environment. A larger environment that includes multiple departments, partners, or participants across the Web requires complex resource identification, policy management, authentication, encryption, and secure sandboxing functionality.

Administrators or others with rights can define which jobs and users get access to which systems, and who gets priority in various situations based on rank, deadlines, and the perceived importance of each project. Obviously, robust authentication, encryption, and sandboxing are necessary to prevent unauthorized access to systems and data within distributed systems that are meant to be inaccessible. If you take the ideal of a distributed worldwide grid to the extreme, it requires standards and protocols for dynamic discovery and interaction of resources in diverse network environments and among different distributed computing architectures. Most distributed computing solutions also include toolkits, libraries, and API's for porting third party applications to work with their platform, or for creating distributed computing applications from scratch.

Comparisons and Other Trends

Distributed vs. Other Trends

Application Characteristics
Obviously not all applications are suitable for distributed computing. The closer an application gets to running in real time, the less appropriate it is. Even processing tasks that normally take an hour are two may not derive much benefit if the communications among distributed systems and the constantly changing availability of processing clients becomes a bottleneck. Instead you should think in terms of tasks that take hours, days, weeks, and months. Generally the most appropriate applications consist of "loosely coupled, non-sequential tasks in batch processes with a high compute-to-data ratio." The high compute to data ratio goes hand-in-hand with a high compute-tocommunications ratio, as you don't want to bog down the network by sending large amounts of data to each client, though in some cases you can do so during off hours. Programs with large databases that can be easily parsed for distribution are very appropriate. Clearly, any application with individual tasks that need access to huge data sets will be more appropriate for larger systems than individual PCs. If terabytes of data are involved, a supercomputer makes sense as communications can take place across the system's very high speed backplane without bogging down the network. Server and other dedicated system clusters will be more appropriate for other slightly less data intensive applications. For a distributed application using numerous PCs, the required data should fit very comfortably in the PC's memory, with lots of room to spare. Taking this further, it is recommended that the application should have the capability to fully exploit "coarse-grained parallelism," meaning it should be possible to partition the application into independent tasks or processes that can be computed concurrently. For most solutions there should not be any need for communication between the tasks except at task boundaries, though Data Synapse allows some interprocess communications. The tasks and small blocks of data should be such that they can be processed effectively on a modern PC and report results that, when combined

with other PC's results, produce coherent output. And the individual tasks should be small enough to produce a result on these systems within a few hours to a few days

Distributed Computing Applications

The following scenarios are examples of types of application tasks that can be set up to take advantage of distributed computing. A query search against a huge database that can be split across lots of desktops, with the submitted query running concurrently against each fragment on each desktop. Complex modeling and simulation techniques that increase the accuracy of results by increasing the number of random trials would also be appropriate, as trials could be run concurrently on many desktops, and combined to achieve greater statistical significance (this is a common method used in various types of financial risk analysis). Exhaustive search techniques that require searching through a huge number of results to find solutions to a problem also make sense. Drug screening is a prime example. Complex financial modeling, weather forecasting, and geophysical exploration are on the radar screens of the vendors, as well as car crash and other complex simulations. Many of today's vendors are aiming squarely at the life sciences market, which has a sudden need for massive computing power. Pharmaceutical firms have repositories of millions of different molecules and compounds, some of which may have characteristics that make them appropriate for inhibiting newly found proteins. The process of matching all these ligands to their appropriate targets is an ideal task for distributed computing, and the quicker it's done, the quicker and greater the benefits will be.

Security and Standards Challenges

The major challenges come with increasing scale. As soon as you move outside of a corporate firewall, security and standardization challenges become quite significant. Most of today's vendors currently specialize in applications that stop at the corporate firewall, though Avaki, in particular, is staking out the global grid territory. Beyond spanning firewalls with a single platform, lies the challenge of spanning multiple firewalls and platforms, which means standards.

Most of the current platforms offer high level encryption such as Triple DES. The application packages that are sent to PCs are digitally signed, to make sure a rogue application does not infiltrate a system. Avaki comes with its own PKI (public key infrastructure). Identical application packages are typically sent to multiple PCs and the results of each are compared. Any set of results that differs from the rest becomes security suspect. Even with encryption, data can still be snooped when the process is running in the client's memory, so most platforms create application data chunks that are so small, that it is unlikely snooping them will provide useful information. Avaki claims that it integrates easily with different existing security infrastructures and can facilitate the communications among them, but this is obviously a challenge for global distributed computing. Working out standards for communications among platforms is part of the typical chaos that occurs early in any relatively new technology. In the generalized peerto-peer realm lies the Peer-to-Peer Working Group, started by Intel, which is looking to devise standards for communications among many different types of peer-to-peer platforms, including those that are used for edge services and collaboration. The Global Grid Forum is a collection of about 200 companies looking to devise grid computing standards. Then you have vendor-specific efforts such as Sun's Open Source JXTA platform, which provides a collection of protocols and services that allows peers to advertise themselves to and communicate with each other securely. JXTA has a lot in common with JINI, but is not Java specific (thought the first version is Java based). Intel recently released its own peer-to-peer middleware, the Intel Peer-to-Peer Accelerator Kit for Microsoft .Net, also designed for discovery, and based on the Microsoft.Net platform.

GRID COMPUTING
Introduction
Grid computing, emerging as a new paradigm for next-generation computing, enables the sharing, selection, and aggregation of geographically distributed heterogeneous resources for solving large-scale problems in science, engineering, and commerce. The resources in the Grid are heterogeneous and geographically distributed. Availability, usage and cost policies vary depending on the particular user, time, priorities and goals. It enables the regulation of supply and demand for resources. It provides an incentive for resource owners to participate in the Grid; and motivates the users to trade-off between deadline, budget, and the required level of quality of service. The thesis demonstrates the capability of economic-based systems for wide-area parallel and distributed computing by developing users quality-of-service requirements-based scheduling strategies, algorithms, and systems. It demonstrates their effectiveness by performing scheduling experiments on the World-Wide Grid for solving parameter sweeptask and data parallelapplications. The Grid unites servers and storage into a single system that acts as a single computer - all your applications tap into all your computing power. Hardware resources are fully utilized and spikes in demand are met with ease. This Web site sponsored by Oracle brings you the resources you need to evaluate your organization's adoption of grid technologies. The Grid is ready when you are.

The Grid
The Grid is the computing and data management infrastructure that will provide the electronic underpinning for a global society in business, government, research, science and entertainment, integrate networking, communication, computation and information to provide a virtual platform for computation and data management in the same way that the Internet integrates resources to form a virtual platform for

information. The Grid is the computing and data management infrastructure that will provide the electronic. Grid infrastructure will provide us with the ability to dynamically link together resources as an ensemble to support the execution of large-scale, resourceintensive, and distributed applications. Grid is a type of parallel and distributed system that enables the sharing, selection, and aggregation of geographically distributed "autonomous" resources dynamically at runtime depending on their availability, capability, performance, cost, and users' quality-of-service requirements.

Beginning of the Grid

Parallel computing in the 1980s focused researchers efforts on the development of algorithms, programs and architectures that supported simultaneity. During the 1980s and 1990s, software for parallel computers focused on providing powerful mechanisms for managing communication between processors, and development and execution environments for parallel machines. Successful application paradigms were developed to leverage the immense potential of shared and distributed memory architectures. Initially it was thought that the Grid would be most useful in extending parallel computing paradigms from tightly coupled clusters to geographically distributed systems. However, in practice, the Grid has been utilized more as a platform for the integration of loosely coupled applications some components of which might be running in parallel on a lowlatency parallel machine and for linking disparate resources (storage, computation, visualization, instruments). Coordination and distribution two fundamental concepts in Grid Computing. The first modern Grid is generally considered to be the information wide-area year (IWAY). Developing infrastructure and applications for the I-WAY provided a seminar and powerful experience for the first generation of modern Grid researchers and projects. This was important, as the development of Grid research requires a very different focus than distributed computing research. Grid research focuses on addressing

the problems of integration and management of software. I-WAY opened the door for considerable activity in the development of Grid software.

Characteristics
An enterprise-computing grid is characterized by three primary features Diversity: A typical computing grid consists of many hundreds of managed resources of various kinds including servers, storage, Database Servers, Application Servers, Enterprise Applications, and system services like Directory Services, Security and Identity Management Services, and others. Managing these resources and their life cycle is a complex challenge. Decentralization: Traditional distributed systems have typically been managed from a central administration point. A computing grid further compounds these challenges since the resources can be even more decentralized and may be geographically distributed across many different data centers within an enterprise. Dynamism: Components of a traditional application typically run in a static environment without the needing to address rapidly changing demands. In a computing grid, however, the systems and applications need to be able to flexibly adapt to changing demand. For instance, with the late binding nature and cross-platform properties of web services, an application deployed on the grid may consist of a constantly changing set of components. At different points in time, these components can be hosted on different nodes in the Diversity; Decentralization Dynamism

network. Managing an application in such a dynamic environment can be a challenging undertaking.

A Community of Grid Model

Over the last decade, the Grid community has begun to converge on a layered model that allows development of the complex system of services and software required to integrate Grid resources. The Community Grid Model (a layered abstraction of the grid) being developed in a loosely coordinated manner throughout academia and the commercial sector. The bottom horizontal layer of the Community Grid Model consists of the hardware resources that underlie the Grid. Such resources include computers, networks, data archives, instruments, visualization devices and so on. Moreover, the resource pool represented by this layer is highly dynamic, both as a result of new resources being added to the mix and old resources being retired, and as a result of varying observable performance of the resources in the shared, multi-user environment of the Grid.

Figure 1: Layered architecture of the Community Grid Model. The next horizontal layer (common infrastructure) consists of the software services and systems, which virtualized the Grid. The key concept at the common infrastructure layer is community agreement on software, which will represent the Grid

as a unified virtual platform and provide the target for more focused software and applications. The next horizontal layer (user and application-focused Grid middleware, tools and services) contains software packages built atop the common infrastructure. This software serves to enable applications to more productively use Grid resources by masking some of the complexity involved in system activities such as authentication, file transfer.

Types Of Grid
Grid computing can be used in a variety of ways to address various kinds of application requirements. Often, grids are categorized by the type of solutions that they best address. The three primary types of grids are Computational grid A computational grid is focused on setting aside resources specifically for computing power. In this type of grid, most of the mchines are high-performance servers. Scavenging grid A scavenging grid is most commonly used with large numbers of desktop machines. Machines are scavenged for available CPU cycles and other resources. Owners of the desktop machines are usually given control over when their resources are available to participate in the grid. Data grid A data grid is responsible for housing and providing access to data across multiple organizations. Users are not concerned with where this data is located as long as they have access to the data. For example, you may have two universities doing life science

research, each with unique data. A data grid would allow them to share their data, manage the data, and manage security issues such as who has access to what data. Another common distributed computing model that is often associated with or confused with Grid computing is peer-to-peer computing. In fact, some consider this is another form of Grid computing.

Grid Tools
Infrastructure components include file systems, schedulers and resource managers, messaging systems, security applications, certificate authorities, and file transfer mechanisms like Grid FTP. Directory services. Systems on a grid must be capable of discovering what services are available to them. In short, Grid systems must be able to define (and monitor) a grids topology in order to share and collaborate. Many Grid directory services implementations are based on past successful models, such as LDAP, DNS, network management protocols, and indexing services. Schedulers and load balancers. One of the main benefits of a grid is maximizing efficiency. Schedulers and load balancers provide this function and more. Schedulers ensure that jobs are completed in some order (priority, deadline, urgency, for instance) and load balancers distribute tasks and data management across systems to decrease the chance of bottlenecks. Developer tools. Every arena of computing endeavor requires tools that allow developers to succeed. Tools for grid developers focus on different niches (file transfer, communications, environment control), and range from utilities to fullblown APIs. Security. Security in a grid environment can mean authentication and authorization -- in other words, controlling who/what can access a grids resources -- but it can mean a lot more. For instance, message integrity and message confidentiality are crucial to financial and healthcare environments

Grid Components
Depending on the grid design and its expected use, some of these components may or may not be required, and in some cases they may be combined to form a hybrid component. Portal/user interface Just as a consumer sees the power grid as a receptacle in the wall, a grid user should not see all of the complexities of the computing grid. Although the user interface can come in many forms and be application-specific. A grid portal provides the interface for a user to launch applications that will use the resources and services provided by the grid. From this perspective, the user sees the grid as a virtual computing resource just as the consumer of power sees the receptacle as an. interface to a virtual generator.

Figure 2: Possible user view of a grid Security A major requirement for Grid computing is security. At the base of any grid environment, there must be mechanisms to provide security, including authentication, authorization, data encryption, and so on. The Grid Security Infrastructure (GSI) component of the Globus Toolkit provides robust security mechanisms. The GSI includes an OpenSSL implementation. It also provides a single sign-on mechanism, so that once a user is authen authenticated, a proxy certificate is created and used when performing actions within the grid. When designing your grid environment, you may use the GSI sign-in to grant access to the portal, or you may have your own security for the portal. The portal will then be responsible for signing in to the grid, either using the user's credentials or using a generic set of credentials for all authorized users of the portal.

Figure 3: Security in a grid environment Broker Once authenticated, the user will be launching an application. Based on the application, and possibly on other parameters provided by the user, the next step is to identify the available and appropriate resources to use within the grid. This task could be carried out by a broker function. Although there is no broker implementation provided by Globus, there is an LDAP-based information service. This service is called the Grid Information Service (GIS), or more commonly the Monitoring and Discovery Service (MDS). This service provides information about the available resources within the grid and their status. A broker service could be developed that utilizes MDS.

Figure 4: Broker service Scheduler

Once the resources have been identified, the next logical step is to schedule the individual jobs to run on them. If sets of stand-alone jobs are to be executed with no interdependencies, then a specialized scheduler may not be required. However, if you want to reserve a specific resource or ensure that different jobs within the application run concurrently (for instance, if they require inter-process communication), then a job scheduler should be used to coordinate the execution of the jobs. The Globus Toolkit does not in include such a scheduler, but there are several schedulers available that have been tested with and can be used in a Globus grid environment. It should also be noted that there could be different levels of schedulers within a grid environment. For instance, a cluster could be represented as a single resource. The cluster may have its own scheduler to help manage the nodes it contains. A higher-level scheduler (sometimes called a meta scheduler) might be used to schedule work to be done on a cluster, while the cluster's scheduler would handle the actual scheduling of work on the cluster's individual nodes.

Figure 5: Scheduler Data management If any data -- including application modules -- must be moved or made accessible to the nodes where an application's jobs will execute, then there needs to be a secure and reliable method for moving files and data to various nodes within the grid. The Globus

Toolkit contains a data management component that provides such services. This component, know as Grid Access to Secondary Storage (GASS), includes facilities such as GridFTP. GridFTP is built on top of the standard FTP protocol, but adds additional functions and utilizes the GSI for user authentication and authorization. Therefore, once a user has an authenticated proxy certificate, he can use the GridFTP facility to move files without having to go through a login process to every node involved. This facility provides third-party file transfer so that one node can initiate a file transfer between two other nodes.

Figure 6: Data management Job and resource management With all the other facilities we have just discussed in place, we now get to the core set of services that help perform actual work in a grid environment. The Grid Resource Allocation Manager (GRAM) provides the services to actually launch a job on a particular resource, check its status, and retrieve its results when it is complete.

Figure 7: Gram Job flow in a grid environment Enabling an application for a grid environment, it is important to keep in mind these components and how they relate and interact with one another. Depending on your grid implementation and application requirements, there are many ways in which these pieces can be put together to create a solution.

Advantages
Grid computing is about getting computers to work together. Almost every organization is sitting on top of enormous, unused computing capacity, widely distributed. Mainframes are idle 40% of the time With Grid computing, businesses can optimize computing and data resources, pool them for large capacity workloads, share them across networks, and enable collaboration. Many consider Grid computing the next logical step in the evolution of the Internet, and maturing standards and a drop in the cost of bandwidth are fueling the momentum we're experiencing today.

Challenges of the Grid

A word of caution should be given to the overly enthusiastic. The grid is not a silver bullet that can take any application and run it a 1000 times faster without the need for buying any more machines or software. Not every application is suitable or enabled for running on a grid. Some kinds of applications simply cannot be parallelized. For others, it can take a large amount of work to modify them to achieve faster throughput. The configuration of a grid can greatly affect the performance, reliability, and security of an organization's computing infrastructure. For all of these reasons, it is important for us to understand how far the grid has evolved today and which features are coming tomorrow or in the distant future

Conclusion
Grid computing introduces a new concept to IT infrastructures because it supports distributed computing over a network of heterogeneous resources and is enabled by open standards. The advantages of distributed type of architecture for the right kind of applications are impressive. The most obvious is the ability to provide access to supercomputer level processing power or better for a fraction of the cost of a typical supercomputer. Grid computing works to optimize underutilized resources, decrease capital expenditures, and reduce the total cost of ownership, however, the specific promise of distributed computing lies mostly in harnessing the system resources that lies within the firewall. It will take years before the systems on the Net will be sharing compute resources as effortlessly as they can share information. Scalability is also a great advantage of distributed computing. Though they provide massive processing power, super computers are typically not very scalable once they're installed. A distributed computing installation is infinitely scalable--simply add more systems to the environment. In a corporate distributed computing setting, systems might

be added within or beyond the corporate firewall. On the other hand, Grid computing is about getting computers to work together. Almost every organization is sitting on top of enormous, unused computing capacity, widely distributed. Mainframes are idle 40% of the time With Grid computing, businesses can optimize computing and data resources, pool them for large capacity workloads, share them across networks, and enable collaboration. Many consider Grid computing the next logical step in the evolution of the Internet, and maturing standards and a drop in the cost of bandwidth are fueling the momentum we're experiencing today.

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